Room For Debate: For Starters, ‘Unsex’ the Birth Certificate

The moment when a new baby officially becomes a legal person from the state’s view is the filing of a birth certificate. The information on the certificate — the child’s name, parents and sex — stays with a person for life. Choosing a sex using traditional choices sends a child’s life down one or the other path: male or female. But this sex binary ignores everything contemporary science knows about sex, namely that many factors of sex difference — chromosomal, genital and hormonal — make sex a far richer set of possibilities than just male or female. Likewise, contemporary psychology tells us that both masculinity and femininity are specific to each of us…